Introducing EM-FT for Manipuri-English Neural Machine Translation

This paper introduces a pretrained word embedding for Manipuri, a low-resourced Indian language. The pretrained word embedding based on FastText is capable of handling the highly agglutinating language Manipuri (mni). We then perform machine translation (MT) experiments using neural network (NN) models. In this paper, we confirm the following observations. Firstly, the reported BLEU score of the Transformer architecture with FastText word embedding model EM-FT performs better than without in all the NMT experiments. Secondly, we observe that adding more training data from a different domain of the test data negatively impacts translation accuracy. The resources reported in this paper are made available in the ELRA catalogue to help the low-resourced languages community with MT/NLP tasks.